david suzuki – Olduvai.ca

Renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation offer numerous advantages over fossil fuels beyond climate benefits.

A fossil fuel plant pumping pollutants into the air — As the world breaks heat records, our biggest roadblock is fossil fuel companies, and their influence. Credit: Chris LeBoutillier / Unsplash

On July 6, the world’s average temperature was the hottest ever recorded, at 17.23 C. That beat the previous highs on… July 3 and 4! June was the hottest month ever, but July is shaping up to be even hotter. Experts expect more records to break over the next while, as an El Niño weather pattern combines with record emissions to drive up temperatures.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told the Washington Post, noting that “we are in uncharted territory.” Temperatures are hotter than they’ve been in 125,000 years!

People worldwide are feeling the effects, with scorching heat from Africa to Europe, across China and the southern U.S. Records are even breaking in Antarctica, where warming drove sea ice to 17 per cent below the 1991-2020 June average. In Canada, May was the hottest month ever, until June recorded even higher temperatures. We see the results in air congested with wildfire smoke.

Heat and humidity are already causing an increasing number of direct deaths, along with numerous other negative impacts — floods, droughts, wildfires, refugee crises, water shortages, biodiversity loss and more.

How bad does it have to get before the world wakes up?

Unless we reject the widespread power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in all aspects of our lives, we could reach the point of no return before we employ the many available and emerging solutions.

Industry puts massive resources into convincing people that curbing the crisis will cause too much hardship. Shell chief executive Wael Sawan recently offered an example…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Rest is good, but resolving global crises means not looking away

January 20, 2022

Rest is good, but resolving global crises means not looking away

plastic by Gary Bell — Photo by Gary Bell/gettyimages.ca

When people do things they shouldn’t, they often try to distract attention from their actions. Guardian writer George Monbiot notes that many corporations fuelling the planet’s destruction spend significant resources to shift attention away from themselves and onto us.

“The deliberate effort to stop us seeing the bigger picture began in 1953 with a campaign called Keep America Beautiful. It was founded by packaging manufacturers, motivated by the profits they could make by replacing reusable containers with disposable plastic,” he writes. “In 2004, the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, working for the oil giant BP, took this blame-shifting a step further by inventing the personal carbon footprint. It was a useful innovation, but it also had the effect of diverting political pressure from the producers of fossil fuels to consumers.”

“Greenwashing” is another way corporations divert attention from their true ecological impacts. As British psychology professor Steven Reicher points out, “One recent McDonald’s spot boasts of the way the company is recycling cooking oil into truck fuel, coffee cups into greetings cards, and plastic toys into children’s playgrounds. The problem is that it makes no mention of the fact that McDonald’s beef footprint alone constitutes 22m metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year.”

Facing the real issues often leaves us feeling anger, anxiety and despair. While these are reasonable responses to the environmental crises engulfing us, the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry has profited enormously by convincing us that fixing ourselves is the priority.

How do we balance the need for personal change with systemic change, when both are necessary?

Personal actions can create consumer demand for sustainably made products, model greener behaviours and foster empowerment. But focusing on the personal runs the risk of eclipsing our responsibility to also marshal systemic change.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Major Health Study Shows Benefits of Combating Climate Change

December 15, 2018

Major Health Study Shows Benefits of Combating Climate Change

Commuters by bike share in New York City

During the holiday season, people often drink toasts to health. There’s something more we can do to ensure that we and others will enjoy good health now and into the future: combat climate change.

“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century, and tackling it could be our greatest health opportunity,” according to the medical journal The Lancet.

The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change, by 150 experts from 27 academic institutions and intergovernmental organizations, including the World Health Organization and the World Bank, is blunt: “A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease, and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air.”

The report examines the association between health and climate change, including resilience and adaptation, financial and economic implications, the health and economic benefits of addressing the crisis, and the need for political and societal engagement, with a greater role for health professionals.

Sadly, the researchers conclude that a lack of concerted effort from governments is compromising human health and health infrastructure and services. They note some progress has been made, including a global decline in coal use, rapid growth in renewable energy installation and increasing fossil fuel divestment.

But it’s far short of what’s needed to keep global average temperature from rising more than 2 C, let alone the more ambitious target of 1.5 C.

People in more than 90 percent of cities breathe air that is toxic to cardiovascular and respiratory health, and it appears to be getting worse, “particularly in low-income and middle-income countries.” Pollutants from burning coal and other fossil fuels are causing millions of premature deaths every year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Decades of Denial and Stalling Have Created a Climate Crunch

December 1, 2018

Decades of Denial and Stalling Have Created a Climate Crunch

Firefighters spray water on a 2013 bush fire in Australia

In a 1965 speech to members, American Petroleum Institute president Frank Ikard outlined the findings of a report by then-president Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee, based in part on research the institute conducted in the 1950s.

“The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out,” Ikard said, adding, “One of the most important predictions of the report is that carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000 the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”

Many scientists were reaching similar conclusions, based on a body of evidence that had been growing at least since French mathematician Joseph Fourier described the greenhouse effect in 1824. In the 1950s, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budykoexamined how feedback loops amplify human influences on the climate. He published two books, in 1961 and 1962, warning that growing energy use will warm the planet and cause Arctic ice to disappear, creating feedback cycles that would accelerate warming.

The predictions have proven to be accurate, and evidence for human-caused global warming has since become indisputable.

What happened? Over the ensuing decades, the fossil fuel industry didn’t try to resolve what it knew would become a crisis. Instead, it worked to downplay and often deny the reality of climate change and to sow doubt and confusion. Knowingly putting humanity — and countless other species — at risk for the sake of profit is an intergenerational crime against humanity, but it’s unlikely any perpetrators will face justice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ocean Warming Study Criticism Shows How the Scientific Method Works

November 22, 2018

Ocean Warming Study Criticism Shows How the Scientific Method Works

Overhead view of shark swimming in the Maldives

Errors in a recent ocean warming study illustrate global warming’s complexity. They also show the depths to which climate science deniers will stoop to dismiss or downplay evidence for human-caused climate change.

The study by researchers from the U.S., China, France and Germany concluded, “ocean warming is at the high end of previous estimates” and global warming might be advancing faster than scientists thought. British researcher Nic Lewis, who has a math and physics background, found discrepancies, which he noted on a skeptic’s blog. The scientists acknowledged the errors and offered a correction to the study, published in Nature.

The controversy illustrates how the scientific method works. Studies are often amended or overturned as new information becomes available or as inconsistencies or errors are pointed out.

Study co-author Ralph Keeling, a geosciences professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, noted, “The overall conclusion that oceans are trapping more and more heat mirrors other studies and is not inaccurate, but the margin of error in the study is larger than originally thought.”

Some climate science deniers have seized on the error to imply it discredits the mountains of evidence for human-caused climate change amassed by scientists from around the world for close to 200 years — evidence accepted by every legitimate scientific academy and institution and every government except the current U.S. administration.

Those who understand science haven’t taken such a hard line. Even Lewis, who’s skeptical about climate models and warming rate predictions, said the study’s methodology is “novel, and certainly worthy of publication” and that the errors were “serious (but surely inadvertent).” He criticized Nature for not scrutinizing the study better, and mainstream media for extensive, “unquestioning” coverage.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Energy Efficiency and Technology Squeeze the Carbon Bubble

June 25, 2018

Energy Efficiency and Technology Squeeze the Carbon Bubble

Homeowner installing programmable thermostat to help weatherize home

The carbon bubble will burst with or without government action, according to a new study. That will hurt people who invest in fossil fuels.

As energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies improve and prices drop, global demand for fossil fuels will decline, “stranding” new fossil fuel ventures — likely before 2035, according to the study in Nature Climate Change, “Macroeconomic impact of stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Researchers from Cambridge University and elsewhere found technological advances will strand fossil fuel assets regardless of “whether or not new climate policies are adopted,” but that “the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand.”

That could “amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion,” and Russia, the U.S., and Canada could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down, the report says.

The best way to limit these negative impacts is to divest from fossil fuels and speed up the transition to a diversified, energy-efficient, clean-energy economy. Investing tax dollars to expand fossil fuel development and infrastructure, including pipelines, is irresponsible and incompatible with Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments, putting everyone at economic risk, and leaving us with polluted air, water and land, and increasing climate impacts and healthcare bills.

Lead author Jean-François Mercure told the Guardian, “With more policies from governments, this would happen faster. But without strong [climate] policies, it is already happening. To some degree at least you can’t stop it. But if people stop putting funds now in fossil fuels, they may at least limit their losses.”

Co-author Jorge Viñuales said, “Individual nations cannot avoid the situation by ignoring the Paris agreement or burying their heads in coal and tar sands.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We ignore urgent global warnings at our peril

February 19, 2018

We ignore urgent global warnings at our peril

City lights in this nighttime view of Earth from space provides “an intuitively graspable view of our planet”. (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr)

It called for a new ethic that encompasses our responsibility to ourselves and nature and that recognizes our dependence on Earth and its natural systems. It also called for stabilizing human population through “improved social and economic conditions, and the adoption of effective, voluntary family planning.” Now, 25 years later, we’ve added two billion people, a 35 per cent increase.

Despite progress in stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, all the other problems scientists looked at in 1992 have worsened.

On the declaration’s 25th anniversary in November, more than 15,000 scientists from around the world signed a new warning — “the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article.” The BioScience article states, “By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperilled biosphere.”

It raises concerns about climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from “burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production — particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption.” And it points out, “we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Faulty Logic Fuels Fossil Fools

March 9, 2017

Faulty Logic Fuels Fossil Fools

Apparently, fossil fuel companies protect watersheds and rivers by removing oil. That’s according to comments on the David Suzuki Foundation Facebook page and elsewhere, including this: “The amount of contamination occuring [sic] from extraction is far less than if we just left the oil there to continue polluting the waterways.”

The “logic” of climate change deniers and anti-environmentalists is often baffling. Although the person who posted that comment doesn’t appear to claim professional background or knowledge, Canadian anti-environmentalist Patrick Moore — who capitalizes on his science degree and long-ago association with Greenpeace to shill for polluting industries — told the Vancouver Sun in 2011 that oil companies are “leaving the soil cleaner than they found it because they’re removing the oil from it.”

Those who coat their “alternative facts” with a veneer of “expertise” often employ twisted logic. Take a petition letter urging U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Letter author Richard Lindzen, a climate skeptic whose work has often been debunked, claims “more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world” signed the petition. What kind of “eminent scientists” would sign something claiming carbon dioxide “is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth” and that “warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign”?

The idea that CO2 is little more than plant food is common in denier circles, floated recently by the U.S.Heartland Institute, its affiliated industry promoters like Canadians Patrick Moore and Tom Harris, and others. In a 2014 book, two signatories to the Trump letter, retired Environment Canada scientist Madhav Khandekar and retired Australian geology professor Cliff Ollier, along with database marketing consultant Arthur Middleton Hughes, wrote the world should burn more coal “to produce electricity and increase CO2in the atmosphere.” They also argue for more use of the pesticide DDT.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

David Suzuki: We Can’t Dig Our Way Out of the Fossil Fuels Hole

October 16, 2016

David Suzuki: We Can’t Dig Our Way Out of the Fossil Fuels Hole

Rather than focusing on short-term economic and corporate priorities, though, politicians should first consider the long-term health and well-being of the people they’re elected to represent. When it comes to climate change and fossil fuels, many aren’t living up to that.

We celebrate the federal government’s decision to implement nation-wide carbon pricing, even though what’s proposed won’t, without additional measures like regulations, get us to our commitments under the Paris Agreement, which is also inadequate for keeping global warming from catastrophic levels. A government could be forgiven for going slow on a measure opposed by some industrial sectors, provinces and citizens, but it’s difficult to take a government seriously when it approves or supports expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and development while the world continues to break warming records, with increasingly dire consequences.

A massive B.C. “carbon bomb” LNG project in the midst of critical salmon-rearing territory, in defiance of many area First Nations’ wishes. Likely approval of at least one more bitumen pipeline to support expanded oil sands development. A provincial government that pretty much says, “We’ll support federal efforts to fight climate change if you support our efforts to fuel it.” None of this makes sense.

As a report from non-profit Oil Change International and 14 other groups concludes, “The potential carbon emissions from the oil, gas, and coal in the world’s currently operating fields and mines would take us beyond 2°C of warming,” and “The reserves in currently operating oil and gas fields alone, even with no coal, would take the world beyond 1.5°C.” That’s without any new development!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will Cap-And-Trade Slow Climate Change?

March 2, 2016

Will Cap-And-Trade Slow Climate Change?

Site C Is a Climate-Change Disaster, Says Suzuki

February 24, 2016

Site C Is a Climate-Change Disaster, Says Suzuki

‘We have to rethink everything’ says noted environmentalist. A Tyee Q&A.

David Suzuki and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip at a media scrum outside the B.C. Superior Court Monday morning. Photo by Mychaylo Prystupa.

Flooding valuable farmland to build the Site C dam undermines Canada’s commitment to meet international climate-change targets, environmentalist David Suzuki said outside a B.C. courtroom this week.

The farmland is needed to reduce B.C.’s dependence on imported foods, Suzuki said, and eliminate the huge amounts of carbon fuels needed to bring those foods here.

“It seems to me crazy to put farmland in the north underwater,” he said. “We live in a food chain now in which food grows on average 3,000 kilometres from where it’s consumed. The transport of all that food is dependent on fossil fuels.

“Food has got to be grown much closer to where it’s going to be consumed,” he said.

Instead of building dams and pipelines, Canada should “massively encourage” wind, solar and geothermal energy projects and put a stiff price on carbon emissions, he said.

Suzuki joined Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, head of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, at a news conference on the steps of B.C. Supreme Court just before the latest battle over the Site C hydroelectric project began inside.

BC Hydro is seeking an injunction to prevent protesters at the Rocky Mountain Fort camp from “physically interfering” with the construction of Site C. The B.C. government approved the $8.3-billion dam in late 2014.

If completed, Site C would flood about 83 kilometres of the Peace River valley near Hudson’s Hope, much of it fertile land, and generate enough electricity to power 450,000 homes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Zero Carbon Emissions: The New Language Of Climate Change

July 1, 2015

Zero Carbon Emissions: The New Language Of Climate Change

This is a guest post by David Suzuki.

If nothing else, the G7 countries’ recent agreement to end fossil fuel use for energy by 2100 signals a shift in the way we talk and think about global warming. Previous agreements were about reducing carbon emissions from burning coal, oil and gas. This takes matters a step further by envisioning a fossil fuel–free future.

There are reasons for cynicism: the long time frame means none of the politicians involved in the commitment will even be alive, let alone held accountable, for meeting the target in 2100; Canada and Japan watered down Germany’s proposal to end fossil fuel energy by 2050; and many governments, including Canada’s, haven’t met even their current weak commitments. But in calling for deep emissions cuts by 2050 and an end to fossil fuel energy by 2100 — “decarbonization” — the non-binding pledge at least shows governments recognize the need to confront climate change.

Canada could show it takes the commitment seriously by heeding the advice of 100 scientists (including 12 Royal Society of Canada fellows, 22 U.S. National Academy of Sciences members, five Order of Canada recipients and a Nobel Prize winner, from a range of disciplines) who released a statement with 10 reasons why “No new oil sands or related infrastructure projects should proceed unless consistent with an implemented plan to rapidly reduce carbon pollution, safeguard biodiversity, protect human health, and respect treaty rights.”

According to Simon Fraser University energy economist and statement co-author Mark Jaccard, “Leading independent researchers show that significant expansion of the oil sands and similar unconventional oil sources is inconsistent with efforts to avoid potentially dangerous climate change.”

Another author, Northern Arizona University ecologist Tom Sisk, said it’s not just about climate: “Oil sands development is industrializing and degrading some of the wildest regions of the planet, contaminating its rivers, and transforming a landscape that stores huge amounts of carbon into one that releases it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Water Is Life; We Can’t Afford To Waste It

April 2, 2015

Water Is Life; We Can’t Afford To Waste It

How long can you go without water? You could probably survive a few weeks without water for cooking. If you stopped washing, the threat to your life might only come from people who can’t stand the smell. But most people won’t live for more than three days without water to drink. It makes sense: our bodies are about 65 per cent water.

According to the United Nations, about 750 million people lack access to safe water — that’s one in nine! One child dies every minute from a water-related disease and 1.2 billion people, a fifth of the global population, live in areas where water is scarce. And it’s not just in other countries. As of January, at least 1,838 drinking water advisories were in effect in Canada, including 169 in 126 First Nations communities — some ongoing for years.

With Canada’s abundant glaciers, lakes, rivers and streams, we often take water for granted. (In my home province, we give it away to large corporations that bottle and sell it back to us at exorbitant prices!) We shouldn’t be so complacent. People in California thought they had enough water to fill swimming pools, water gardens and yards, support a fertile agricultural industry and shoot massive volumes into the ground to fracture shale deposits to release the oil they contain. Now, with the state in its fourth year of severe drought, regulators are considering emergency legislation and have imposed restrictions to deal with shortages.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Must Start Digging Our Way Out of Canada’s Mining Dilemma

January 15, 2015

We Must Start Digging Our Way Out of Canada’s Mining Dilemma

It sometimes seems people in the mining and fossil fuel industries — along with their government promoters — don’t believe in the future. What else could explain the mad rush to extract and use up the Earth’s resources as quickly and wastefully as possible?

Global mining production, including fossil fuels, has almost doubled since 1984, from just over nine-billion tonnes to almost 17-billion in 2012, with the greatest increases over the past 10 years.

It’s partly to meet rising demand from expanding human populations and supply the cycle of consumerism that fuels the global economy through planned obsolescence, marketing unnecessary products and wasteful technologies. And, as the British Geological Survey notes, “It may be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but wars have been the drivers for many of mankind’s technological developments. Such technologies depend on secure supplies of numerous mineral commodities for which demand inevitably escalates in times of war.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Where Is the Political Leadership to Confront Climate Change?

January 8, 2015

Where Is the Political Leadership to Confront Climate Change?

Abundant, cheap fossil fuels have driven explosive technological, industrial and economic expansion for more than a century. The pervasive infrastructure developed to accommodate this growth makes it difficult to contemplate rapidly shifting away from coal, oil and gas, which creates a psychological barrier to rational discourse on energy issues.

The ecological and true economic costs of energy use force us to scrutinize our way of living. And because our infrastructure doesn’t allow us to entirely avoid fossil fuels, we must face the contradiction between how we should live and constraints against doing so.

Canada has no national energy plan, other than governmental desire to be a fossil-fuelled energy-export superpower. Given the consequences of human-induced climate change already hitting home, you’d think the highest priority of governments at all levels would be to decide on the lowest-emission energy path. But politicians focused on election intervals have difficulty dealing with generational issues.

Real, important conversations and decisions are instead delayed by diversionary and often irrational arguments and tactics: accusing critics of being hypocrites, claiming foreign money drives environmental agendas and labelling activists as eco-terrorists or enemies of Canada among them. In place of true progress, we get consolidated political power and greater corporate profit and control. Enough already!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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